It’s been several months since their last major exploit, but the hacking group dubbed Shadow Brokers is back. The group, which last year dumped malware it had allegedly stolen from The Equation Group, a hacking team associated with the NSA, posted new files over the weekend and followed up today with a dump of Windows exploits.

The latest files contain tools apparently designed to access Windows machines, as well as slideshows documenting the targeting of banking systems.

Whilst publicly denying ownership and the validity of these exploits everyone seems to be chasing around patching and fixing the holes, pretty strange if they are as benign as claimed previously, but worrying to folks that question why they have waited this long to patch them given the NSA knew about the hackers threats some time ago and should have assisted MS to do the work back then.

you gotta know the NSA was using many of these for themselves... microsoft doesnt have 3rd party audit-able sourcecode so noone really knows whats running on their machine, and what government organization has access, or is being allowed access by MS themselves... add to that the data slurping of win 10 and you got yourself a stalker on your desktop...

This could open the door to many appeals from prisoners whom could legitimately claim the NSA tossed the files on their machines, this is the problem with not closing down exploit holes rapidly and dumbing down encryption to allow the authorities a backdoor, its a two edged sword and can be used or misused depending on what the game is, to the detriment of all.